Week 2 - Introduction

Welcome to the second week of FLO! This week we are exploring the theme of building community, a key component of a successful online learning experience. You will have opportunities to:

• Recognize the relationship between community, presence, and effective learning, especially as they relate to learning in online environments;
• Relate the Community of Inquiry framework to online learning communities;
• Recognize facilitation strategies that develop social and teaching presence; and
  
• Reflect on strategies for engaging learners in an online learning community.

This week also kicks off the peer facilitation component of FLO, so the week will look a little different to last week. The week is divided into two parts:

• Learning activities (Monday – Thursday): In the first half of the week, you will be guided through a series of learning activities by a team of your peers. Good luck, peer facilitators!
• Reflection activities (Friday – Sunday): In the second half of the week, we zoom out to take a “meta” view of the peer facilitation, offering our feedback to the peer facilitators and our reflections on what we have learned about facilitating learning online. Note that this portion of the week will follow the same format every week.

Before we move into the activities for this week, we invite you to begin reflecting on these concepts: community; human and non-human connections; and relatedness. The TEDxUManitoba video below is titled What Does an Indigenous University Look Like? The video features Niigaanwewidam (James) Sinclair who shares with us a story of connectedness, relatedness, and community. We invite you to get comfortable with a glass or cup of your favourite beverage as you view this video in preparation for the week's activities.

Video length (17:41 mins.)

The importance of diversity and inclusion in online communities

Many factors contribute to increasing diversity in today's classrooms, including global population mobility, internet communications, and knowledge economy demands for lifelong learning. 

Canada’s already multicultural population is projected to become even more diverse as it grows larger, and to reflect greater regional differences (StatsCan, 2022). We are also enjoying an increase in Indigenous student participation in post-secondary education (StatsCan, 2023), as applications of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Calls to Action in education gradually unfold.  An important classroom consideration is that with over 250 ethnic origins or ancestries among the population, English (or French) is often a second or additional language for domestic as well as international students (StatsCan, 2016). Another important consideration is that student bodies will also bring multiple cultural worldviews and different life experiences into the classroom depending on social, cultural, and economic positioning.

In 2022/23, our international student population made up 21.2% of post-secondary enrolments, despite ongoing effects of the COVID pandemic (StatsCan, 2024), Going forward, it’s important to recognize the impacts of current domestic restructuring of international student visas on post-secondary institutions and on the students themselves, and prepare to facilitate in sometimes highly stressed learning contexts.

In addition, 21^st century post-secondary students represent a wide range of ages and abilities, usually work at least part-time to meet expenses, and also have varied family and community responsibilities.  

Students will be looking to educators for mentoring, support, and flexibility to navigate the  socio-cultural complexities and ongoing dramatic changes in today's learning conditions.

In the midst of all this blooming diversity, it may be comforting to hear that student prior knowledge, experience, learning goals, and learning contexts/environments are still the key characteristics to pay attention to. It’s also helpful that online learning options provide a significant portion of the flexibility learners need to meet competing life demands.

Activities this week

There are a number of activities to complete this week, so please refer to the Course schedule  for a complete list of what needs to be completed. In general, please complete activities sequentially in the order that you see them on the course page. Look out for a kick-off post by your peer facilitators in the Announcements (Peer facilitators) forum first thing Monday morning! If you have any questions, please post in the Open forum (Class) or send your FLO facilitators an email.

Good luck peer facilitation team! 😊

(Photo by John Schnobrich  on Unsplash )

[Note for FLO facilitators: We recommend you include an audio option for the text above here if using a platform that does not have an audio feature built in. Remove this note before offering starts.]